


Alleyway

by cupidty11



Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, Gen, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-08
Updated: 2020-04-08
Packaged: 2021-03-02 05:13:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 893
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23539681
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cupidty11/pseuds/cupidty11
Summary: Despite having a quite admirable memory, Bruce Wayne did not remember much of his childhood before the death of his parents.
Kudos: 7





	Alleyway

**Author's Note:**

> So, for my sociology of Death and Dying class' midterm exam, we had to do an 'vignette' about death and then analyze it using terms and concepts we've learned. My brain immediately jumped to Batman as the main character in this vignette because he's got such a strong grief filled story. And...I ended up liking what I wrote.

Despite having a quite admirable memory, Bruce Wayne did not remember much of his childhood before the death of his parents.

He was an odd child. Perhaps that was to be expected when one was alone most of the time in a giant manor. The one memory that sticks out is exploring his father’s library for hours at a time. He remembers pulling a dusty thick tomb from the shelf and running a thumb over the imprinted golden title: _A Good Death: The Merits of Thanatology._

He asked his mother who was used to his incessant questions.

“It’s the study of death, my love.” She took the tome from him in her perfectly manicured hands. He watched her run her thumb over the title in the same way he had. “Perhaps, we will have a long talk about this one day. But, for now, shall we go play in the garden?”

They never had the talk.

Instead, he watched his mother and father die violently before him. Both of them, shot point blank by a stranger in a dark, dingy alleyway. He remembers making no noise. Even as he fell to his knees between their bodies, he was rendered mute.

Perhaps, his privilege, the power his family held, should have rendered death...easy. Or easier at least.

For Bruce was not orphaned in the traditional sense. The family butler, Alfred became his caretaker and the tough older man handled everything with practical logic. There was no worry about funeral costs, and everyone who knew of the Waynes were shocked and sympathetic. There were no whispers of the two wealthy philanthropists ‘deserving’ their deaths for being in the alley in the first place.

Instead, he was often treated to hushed conversations that ended when he came into the room. Of people who looked at him with either sympathy and apologies for his loss or who acted as if he had no real idea of what was happening around him. Distant aunts, uncles, cousins, family friends that excluded him from the proceedings.

As though, he hadn’t sat next to his parent’s bodies in oppressive dark and silence until finally being discovered hours later by a random passerby.

Bruce felt deeply disconnected, like a ghost of his former self. A sense of alienation and anomie overwhelmed him. It was only when he was alone or with Alfred that he felt he could properly express the feelings overwhelming him. It was ugly; tears, snot, screaming, begging, throwing himself to the ground like a tantrum could bring his parents running to comfort him. But it was Alfred who kneeled beside him, who spoke quietly and with restrained emotions. Who pulled the young child to his chest and held him through the storm.

Late at night when his dreams turned to nightmares, and he awoke with terror running wild in his chest, Bruce pulled the book on Thanatology from beneath his pillow and read it late into the night. He kept a dictionary close by to check the words he did not understand.

Because he needed to understand. Their deaths felt senseless. They felt unfair, a cosmic joke. He grappled with the reality of it, until he was full of sorrow and rage in equal measure.

They buried his parents one appropriately rainy day, deep in the earth on the manor grounds. While their deaths had become a media circus, the funeral only consisted of their closest relatives and friends. People spoke fondly, choked with tears, of them, their good deeds, their lives.

And Bruce barely heard any of it. He stared blankly at their dark headstones with their names embedded in gold like the Thanatology book’s title.

Eventually, they all departed, for food and to remember his parents with speeches and laughter and tears. All except Bruce and Alfred who remained in the rain, waiting next to the headstones until the sun finally began to fall towards the horizon. Finally, Alfred gently steered him towards the warmth of the manor that had never felt so big as it did now.

Days, weeks, months, years passed.

People did not forget the Waynes. They did not remember them the way Bruce did, however. He of course had the faintest of memories of love, of laughter and comfort.

But mostly he had that dark alley and his parents' bodies.

He had therapy sessions that ended with him walking out feeling unsatisfied.

He had rage that drove him to run for miles, to lift increasing amounts of weights, to learn more and more about the violence around him, the power indifferences, the lives and deaths of this city’s citizens.

He had sorrow that had him filling his every waking moment with activity, knowledge, because otherwise there was nothing else but that terrible darkened silence.

They diagnosed him with many things. They told him it was okay to remember his parents, to keep them with him. That what he was doing wasn’t healthy. They offered treatments. Perhaps, he should have taken them.

But, by then he’d already learned how to USE his grief. To turn it into action. He’d had it for so long that he did not know who he would be without it.

And he knew that no matter what he tried, there would always be a little part of him that was still sitting in that alleyway with his parents.


End file.
